San Giovanni Maria Vianney is a late 20th century parish church at Via Lentini 6 in the Borghesiana zone, on the west edge of the eastern outer suburb of Finocchio and south of the Via Casilina. The main entrance is on the Largo Monreale, at the east end of the street.
The dedication is to St John Mary Vianney, also familiarly known in English as the "Cure d'Ars".
History[]
The ancestor of the present church was a prefabricated hut erected as a dependent chapel of Santa Maria della Fiducia in 1952.
The parish was established in 1963, but had to wait for a permanent church which was completed in 1990.
In 2012 the church was made titular, the cardinal priest being Rainer Maria Woelki.
Appearance[]
The edifice is a striking Modernist design by Tommaso Sbardella. The plan is based on a rectangle with rounded corners, with a semi-cylindrical apse behind the altar. The roof has two concave pitches meeting at a transverse ridge-line, and the exterior walls are in concrete looking rather cliff-like. At the ridge of the roof on either side there is a device rather like an ancient Roman stela with a semi-circular top, which terminates the roofline. Below the two of these are tall recessed stained-glass windows. The corners of the side walls are rounded, including where they meet these windows.
The external entrance is at the bottom left hand corner as one faces the altar, and has a flat-roofed canopy attached halfway up the rounded corner of the wall of the church at this point. It leads into a narthex, from which one turns left to enter the main church. Straight ahead at this point is a little external chapel of sem-cylindrical form.
There is a dedicatory inscription to the left of the entrance, and a bronze statue of the patron saint below the stained glass window on the street side.
The campanile is very unusual, being in the shape of an concrete grain silo with five horizontal bands marked out by incisions and with a hemispherical cap. However, the whole structure is split vertically and the halves slightly displaced in a horizontal direction and also from each other. In the space thus created horizontal slabs are inserted at the levels marked by the bands, and the bells are hung in the top three storeys.
Liturgy[]
Mass is celebrated (parish website, February 2018):
Weekdays 7:30, 9:00, 18:30;
Sundays and Solemnities 8:00, 10:00, 11:30, 18:30.
The Solemnity of St John Mary Vianney is on 4 August.
The parish has a subsidiary church -Santa Chiara alla Borghesiana (this is a church, not a chapel).